To-Do List: Zimmerman Appears; North Korea Threatens

To know: George Zimmerman will go before a judge today after being charged with second-degree murder … Despite international protest, North Korea could launch a long-range rocket—critics say it’s really a ballistic missile test—as early as today … The federal trial of John Edwards is set to begin today with jury selection … A cease-fire has gone into effect in Syria … Gawker’s “Fox News mole” has outed himself after being suspended from his job with the network and escorted out of its offices.

To read: The American Prospect’s Gabriel Arana writes about his experiences with ex-gay therapy, and about a study by Robert Spitzer that seemed to validate it:

I told Spitzer that Nicolosi had asked me to participate in the 2001 study and recount my success in therapy, but that I never called him. “I actually had great difficulty finding participants,” Spitzer said. “In all the years of doing ex-gay therapy, you’d think Nicolosi would have been able to provide more success stories. He only sent me nine patients.”

“How’d it turn out for you?” he asked. I said that while I stayed in the closet for a few years more than I might have, I ended up accepting my sexuality. At the end of college, I began to have steady boyfriends, and in February of last year—ten years after my last session with Dr. Nicolosi—I married my partner….

I asked about the criticisms leveled at him. “In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” he said. “The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” He said he spoke with the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior about writing a retraction, but the editor declined. (Repeated attempts to contact the journal went unanswered.) …

Spitzer was growing tired and asked how many more questions I had. Nothing, I responded, unless you have something to add.

He did. Would I print a retraction of his 2001 study, “so I don’t have to worry about it anymore”?

For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper. I just went into Word and created a file that read, to the naked eye, as follows:

the Word

Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here’s a snippet: